Wheatland Kings uncertain about 2020-21 season

By Jacob Miller Times Reporter

The Wheatland Kings are uncertain about the possibility of the upcoming 2020-21 season happening.

“The league is basically in a hold pattern right now,” said Wheatland Kings manager Darcy Busslinger. “No decisions can be made because nobody really knows yet what’s going to happen with COVID-19.”

Currently the league is looking into having the south division only play teams within its own division and the north teams playing the north division, then possibly doing a north/south final, but it is still all up in the air.

One of the parts the league has to look at when deciding to play or not is the financial aspect. Busslinger hopes there will be a season but is concerned about the financial side of things.

“If there’s going to be no fans allowed, if there’s no concession, that really hurts our team because we depend a lot on the revenue of the gate of people coming in and 50/50 and so on,” he said. “We’re not going to have that average of 100-150 people at each of our games, so it’s hard to kind of justify being able to play.” 

The team also had to cancel their fundraiser last year, which brought in a lot of income for them.

Having the league play their own divisions for the season would cut costs because teams would not have to take buses from the south to the north. 

Because a decision on the season has yet to be made, Busslinger is unsure if the team will have a camp this year, but isn’t too worried about it.

“We had a young team last year, so fortunately we’re going to be having a lot of our guys return,” he noted. “We could probably get by probably not running a camp and just going into the season.” 

Not having a camp would also save costs for the team.

Currently in the south division, Medicine Hat and High River have decided to take the year off.

In the 2019-20 season the Wheatland Kings ended up going 12-25, got into the playoffs against Medicine Hat but fell in the first round.